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This essay argues that Georges Perec's Life a User's Manual-at once a novel, an apartment building, and a game of chess-articulates compellingly the confluence of literature and architecture that took place in the late twentieth century.
During the late 1960s and 1970s, a shift away from the modernist conceptualization of the building-as-machine became evident in architectural discourse. Architecture began to see its role not as constructing functional and monumental "machines for living," but as providing less rationalized living spaces directly concerned with the quotidian. Influenced by poststructuralist theory, architects and urban planners began to metaphorize their work in terms of writing: buildings and cities became "texts" and "collages" (Ellin 280-88). Faced with the late-twentieth-century breakdown of what architect Peter Eisenman terms the three fictions of classicism-representation, reason, and history-the concept of a unified, rational "work," either literary or architectural, began to be replaced in both disciplines with that of "textuality" (Barthes; Eisenman 172).
While Eisenman spoke of architecture as writing, architectural terminology had already begun to suffuse the writing of Jacques Derrida, who in 1987 described his writing process as one of "building" (Derrida and Eisenman 112). Indeed, by the mid-1980s, Derrida and Eisenman had recognized their parallel concerns and collaborated on a cross-disciplinary project: a design, based upon Derrida's work on khora, for the Parc de la Villette in Paris. More generally, in the late twentieth century, both the literary and the architectural text began to be represented as "collages," their creators "bricoleurs" (Derrida 139; Rowe and Koetter 86-117). In both disciplines, parody and citationality became key concepts, and, moreover, both came to be informed by a kind of Lyotardian game theory. Influential Dutch architect N. John Habraken, for instance, maintained from the early 1970s that the practice of architecture is akin to "playing games." Moreover, in his most recent publication, The Structure of the Ordinary: Form and Control in the Built Environment, Habraken likens the built environment to a game of chess (19-26).
Georges Perec's Life a User's Manual articulates compellingly this confluence of architecture and literary studies that emerged in the mid-1970s. Indeed, according to Nan Ellin, at the time of the novel's production, France was at the forefront of the new architecture, with a "series of important theoretical and historical...